The disclosed embodiments of the present invention relate to video decoding, and more particularly, to a multi-core video decoder system for decoding multiple coding rows by using multiple video decoder cores and related multi-core video decoding method.
Video coding technologies have been widely used in a variety of applications, including digital video streaming, digital video storage, digital television broadcasting, etc. If no video coding is used, the data amount of the video would be very large. For example, considering a video clip having 720×480 pixels per frame, 30 frames per second and a playback time of 90 minutes, the data amount of this video clip is about 167.96 G bytes. The video coding technique achieves data compression by exploiting spatial and temporal redundancy in the video contents. Hence, a video encoder is designed to efficiently reduce spatial and temporal redundancy to achieve the video compression.
When receiving an encoded video bitstream, a video decoder is operative to reconstruct frames of the video by decoding the encoded video bitstream. In general, the conventional video decoder employs one video decoder core to reconstruct frames of a standard definition (SD) video or a high definition (HD) video. However, regarding a ultra high definition (UHD) video, it is composed of frames each having a resolution higher than that of the SD/HD frame. For example, the UHD frame may have a resolution of 3840×2160. The data amount of one UHD frame is larger than that of one SD/HD frame, and may exceed the decoding capability of the conventional single-core video decoder. If the conventional single-core video decoder fails to reconstruct one UHD frame in time, the display quality of the UHD video would be degraded.